News and Analysis
Google Faces Heat After Automated Threat to Shut Down a Cloud Client’s Project
This week’s tech giant in hot water? Google, whose abuse-prevention system apparently shut down and threatened to delete a Cloud client’s project in three days due to perceived misdoing on the client’s part.
Some of London’s Top Retailers Call for a Sales Tax on ‘Largely Online’ Rivals
Under the banner of The New West End Company, the several-hundred-strong collective of some of the U.K. capital’s top retailers is lobbying for a 1% sales tax on primarily online retailers to parallel the property-linked taxes they already pay.
Openings and New Hires at Arrivalist, Lotame, Get Five Stars
Every two weeks, Street Fight rounds up some of the latest hires and new openings in the hyperlocal marketing, tech, and media industries. This week’s roundup includes hires and openings at Yelp, Hootsuite, and dataxu.
Commentary
How Local Search Looks to the Rest of Us
It seems like many recent conversations, webinars, articles, and studies have pointed to the same conclusion: local search as an industry is insufficiently aware of how its products are actually used by consumers and small businesses. Many of the solutions put forward by consumer-facing local publishers and by business-facing services overestimate our appetite for new products and the amount of time and energy we want to spend using online tools…
Local Media’s Data-Driven Future
New value creation is the purpose of media companies today, whether small or big. I genuinely feel sorry for those who believe there is a future in practicing content creation alone. Last week, I called for a strategic makeover. We need a new strategic plan that positions us as more than “just” a media company and behind which our employees can throw their energy. So here are ten things that I view as tactically supporting such a strategy…
Customization Failure: Why Hyperlocal Hasn’t Scaled (Yet)
Most customization that attempts to deliver hyperlocal, or even just local results, falls short. The problem is that they (and we) don’t have much more or better local content and advertising to output than we did in the days before social media and smartphones. A tool is built to operate on a national scale, but the landscape of finding the local information is messy and chaotic, lacking structured data, or consistent geographic coverage…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s New App, Facebook Ads Costlier for SMBs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Can Foursquare Crack Local Search? (New York Times)… Facebook Ads Become ‘Costlier’ Choice for Small Businesses (Wall Street Journal)… Yelp Lied About Review Policies to Inflate Stock Price, Lawsuit Claims (GigaOm)…
Hyperlocal Companies Among 500 Startups’ Latest Batch
Silicon Valley seed fund 500 Startups has announced a new round of startups it will be helping navigate through the tough road to sustainable profitability — and they include a number of brand new companies in local commerce, marketing, and tech. Here are a few interesting hyperlocally focused companies from the latest batch…
5 Pet Sitting Marketplaces in the ‘Sharing Economy’
Americans spent more than $55 billion on their pets in 2013, and a number of hyperlocal startups are looking to capture that puppy fever by creating local marketplaces where pet owners are matched up with people who are willing to take care of their pups while they’re out of town. Here are five hyperlocal pet sitting marketplaces getting in on the action…
Street Fight Daily: Shoppers Flee Stores, Gannett Splits Digital Business
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Shoppers Are Fleeing Physical Stores (Wall Street Journal)… Gannett To Split Print and Broadcast/Digital Divisions (New York Times)… Facebook’s New Video Ads Aren’t Ready for Small Businesses — Yet (Recode)…
As Losses Widen, Groupon Struggles to Redefine Itself
Groupon said Tuesday that losses widened in the second quarter as marketing and sales costs jumped but gross profit remained flat. The culprit, a far less profitable ecommerce business than anticipated, accounted for every dollar of the company’s top-line growth as it struggles to find new footing for its sluggish local deals business…
How the Former CEO of Digg Plans to Win in Local
Earlier this year, Matt Williams, the former CEO of Digg and an Amazon vet, hooked up with a few other former Amazonians to found Pro.com, a local services marketplace that raised $3.5 million from investors that include their former boss Jeff Bezos. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about what local can learn from the early days of ecommerce…
8 Ways to Collect More Customer Email Addresses
The desire to add more subscribers to email marketing lists is nearly universal, and the average merchant hopes to increase his or her email list by 28% this year. Here are eight strategies that businesses should consider for collecting more customer email addresses…
Street Fight Daily: Gannett to Buy Rest of Cars.com, Square Adds Food Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Gannett Said Near Deal to Buy Rest of Cars.com for $1.8 Billion (New York Times)… As Competitors Close In, Square Moves Beyond the Credit Card (Wired)… Picking Through Google’s Pigeon Droppings (SearchEngineLand)…
Mobile Local Apps: To Bundle or Not to Bundle
Facebook last week made the contentious move to force its iPhone and Android app users to “fast switch” to the Messenger app for all future messaging. The outcome will be worth watching for anyone developing mobile apps. Local media players are increasingly faced with decisions about app functionality. That includes whether to unbundle features to specialized apps (think gas prices), or to federate within one…
From Ad Biz to Hyperlocal: Duo Takes Flyer in Fayetteville, Profitably
Today’s digital community news publisher-editors are increasingly likely not to have had experience working for traditional journalism outlets. But that hasn’t prevented them from making their mark — even when they’re competing against platforms that have strong print resources. That’s the case for Todd Gill and Dustin Bartholomew, co-founders of the seven-year-old independent Fayetteville (Ark.) Flyer. In this Q & A, Gill tells how he and Bartholomew achieved success in a market with a major print and digital daily newspaper…
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AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature